experimentation

The last two things I’ve knit have made use of yarns I didn’t think suited me and didn’t know what to do with. Three of them were spinning/dyeing projects that came out brighter than planned, and the fourth was a ball of Lion Brand Fun Fur. Obviously, the solution was to mix them together.

The first item combined a slubby red yarn with blue and purple highlights [1] with black Fun Fur, to make a lightweight garter stitch furry lap blanket currently adorning my chair at work.

The other project used the yarn I spun right after I got my Lendrum wheel last spring. It was one of my few attempts at spinning combed top (Romney, I think) and it’s not bad, I just like the springiness from carded wool better. So I subjected it to various dyeing experiments, and ended up with a light green and an onion skin-derived orange. They’d been sitting in a drawer since last spring, my idea being that maybe the orange would go well with a madder red (if I ever got around to trying that) and the green could be a nice accent on something else.

But November 3rd I was sitting at work, feeling depressed about the state of world affairs, and I suddenly thought, “Why don’t I knit something for Afghans for Afghans?” So I did. I turned the green and orange yarns into an experiment in stranded color knitting, making up patterns as I went along. It was a lot of fun (knitting always makes me feel better). The hat is super thick and warm, though a little large around (maybe I can fix that when I block it?).

I’m going to pull out another ball of yarn that’s been hiding in my (tiny by most standards) stash and start on another hat tonight. Maybe I’ll figure out how to stop knitting while it’s still kid-sized this time.

[1] I bought a Jacob fleece sight unseen from someone online because it was cheap, theoretically because the owner was moving, but it had too much vegetable matter, matted tips, dung tags still attached… this thing was quite a learning experience. I salvaged what I could and used it for a color blending experiment. The purple/blue and green blue batches are just my sort of thing, but the red/blue is too high contrast, I think. So mixing with black helped mute it. My coworkers seem to think the fur is pretty neat, too.